Certificates of peace or war, witnesses to a past of exchanges, ceremonial objects, badges of respect, promises of alliance, seals of a market or a treaty, emoticons before the letter. More elegant than flags, more delicate than coins, as eloquent as speeches, as harmonious as jewelry. Say it with wampum!
These beaded belts made from woven or strung clam and whelk shells, with varied patterns, give off an almost mystical aura. The fascinating exhibition devoted to them by the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal is divided into forty wampums from Europe and North America taken from public and private collections. The McCord owns thirteen, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, co-producer of the exhibition, eighteen. Rare witnesses of ancient pacts.
Leaning over the glass windows, we go back in time to the beginning of the 17th centurye century at the beginning of the 19the century in the northeast of this continent. Some First Nations, especially the sedentary communities able to preserve these artifacts, the Wendat and Iroquois, used their coded language to communicate with each other as well as with the colonizers. The symbolism varies with the use and the illustrations which compose them. On the wall, in photos and paintings from the period, we see leaders proudly displaying them like scepters of power.
Their allegories speak to those who know how to decipher them, specialists on the subject, including Jonathan Lainey, Wendake historian. Through their reliefs, the silhouettes of bound humans or protective dogs, representations of pipes, axes, abstract motifs or Latin expressions sent across the Atlantic to the powerful of the Christian world (even to Pope Gregory XVI) display obvious diplomatic missions. Some belts remain undated, with foggy origins. The exhibition informs us about the purposes, political or otherwise, of several of them, raising burning questions along the way.
We speak of cultural appropriation to denounce the artistic and symbolic kidnapping of community heritage by a dominant group. But the motivations for these exchanges can be more complex, especially when they are combined with the past. The use of wampum taken up by the Whites from the 17th centurye century bore witness above all to the power of the Amerindians, to whose customs the colonial powers had to bend for the barter of furs and treaties. Some less refined belts will have been produced beyond the source communities, as far as France and England, using metal tools which accelerated the creation process. In the 17th centurye century, in New Amsterdam, on the island of Manhattan, wampums were used as currency for the fur trade and the Dutch manufactured them on Long Island.
When the descendants of Europeans ceased the production and use of these objects loaded with meaning after the Anglo-American War of 1812, it was a bad sign for the First Nations. A sign that the new masters no longer needed to respect local practices to establish their domination over already subdued indigenous people.
After the clash of arms, it is through contempt and indifference that people are truly conquered. In turn, they begin to doubt the value of their legacies and get rid of them. This is when the real cultural appropriation begins. In the 19th centurye, when members of indigenous communities sold several wampums to collectors or museum curators, they unwittingly contributed, sometimes out of need of money, to desecrate their world; necklaces of truth reduced more or less to silence, folkloric objects of fantasized curiosity.
Belts of sacred, commercial or warlike shells have taken to the road and lost their footing. Who do they belong to? A gift is a gift, even if historic. A sale is a sale. Certain transactions towards individuals would be more doubtful, but date them… Parts of their symbolism will have been lost from hand to hand along the way, poorly understood, poorly transmitted. There are believed to be no more than 250 wampums left in the world. How precious are those we admire at McCord.
Hopefully, the members of the First Nations concerned, involved in this exhibition, will be able to add their lights to those of the course. Will hidden wampums resurface under this spotlight? Are certain restitutions possible in today’s context which tends to return scattered identity treasures to communities? We leave the Museum with our heads full of questions and doubts, on tiptoe…